His distinctive place in contemporary British literature rests on extraordinarily precise prose that combines irony with close psychological study of character. Ever since his 2004 Booker Prize win for The Line of Beauty, the hallmarks of his writing have been a focus on aesthetics, social class, and historical memory. That novel also placed the gay experience at the center of the British social novel. In The Sparsholt Affair, published in 2017 and released last year in Greek translation (Kastaniotis, translated by Orfeas Apergis), he unfolds a multi-layered family and social saga spanning more than seven decades.

The plot begins during World War II in Oxford, revolving around the charismatic student David Sparsholt, whose hidden desires set off a scandalous chain of events. Through the life of his son Johnny, a gay painter in the London of subsequent decades, the novel explores how social attitudes toward sexuality, art, and human relationships shift across postwar Britain. A translation of his novel Our Evenings, following the life of Dave Win, a gay actor of mixed heritage, from his school years in the 1960s to the present day, is also forthcoming from Kastaniotis.

Through Dave’s memories, we learn much about his coming of age at an exclusive boarding school, his complicated relationship with a privileged classmate (no further spoilers), and the challenges of his theatrical career.

Tanea spoke with the British author via Zoom at some length, on the occasion of his participation in the 5th Chania International Book Festival (in collaboration with the British Council), which opens on the 22nd of this month.

When we first corresponded by email, you wrote that you would need to reread “The Sparsholt Affair” to refresh your memory. We always assume authors know their work inside out, but it turns out you need to revisit it too.

Yes. The novel, as you know, was published nine years ago. And because it has a rather complex structure with five separate episodes, it was actually quite difficult to remember. To be honest, I didn’t reread all of it, but I looked back at certain passages. I hope I’ll manage!

It’s yours, so you can do what you like with it. It opens in wartime Oxford, in 1940. What “tools” did that specific historical period give you?

Well, returning to Oxford has a somewhat faintly autobiographical quality, because the city was an important part of my own life. And I suppose it is an important part of English social history. You know, that period of the Second World War is actually quite unexplored in English literature. If you think about it, students were probably only in Oxford for a year before they were called up. Various colleges also housed government ministries at the time, and the intelligence services were relocated to Blenheim Palace, just outside Oxford. So it was an extraordinary disruption to many people’s lives. I also wanted the book to contain a considerable amount of secrecy. And the imagery of the wartime blackout fitted very well: a perfect cover for any kind of clandestine activity, beyond the fighting.

How do you actually write? Sentence by sentence to achieve the right rhythm, or do you let everything pour out and revise later?

No, I write very slowly. It sounds rather vain, but I write slowly enough to try to get it right the first time. So it takes a long time. I think I’m rather envious of writers who can just dash off a draft quickly and then revise the whole thing. I drag myself forward. And so it probably takes me three or four years to write a book, which I then go over again. I have my editor read it, and a friend or two I trust. I absorb what they say, then look at it again and produce a final version.

In that sense, which writers “haunt” you, so to speak, because of the way they write?

My choices are a bit paradoxical. One writer I greatly admire and who means a lot to me is Henry James, for example. But he wrote rather quickly, partly because he published his novels in serial form, so he had to have a portion ready every month. Tolstoy or Proust were obviously born writers who simply wrote all the time. I don’t think I’m really like that. I’m happy when I’m absorbed in productive work, but I’m also quite lazy by temperament. A large portion of those three or four years I mentioned is spent on other things. I don’t sit at my desk every day.

David Sparsholt enters the novel as a figure of intense physical beauty who unsettles everyone around him. And throughout the book, fleeting moments of mutual desire recur, often mediated through art or even in London clubs. Why did you choose those spaces to explore erotic desire before the era of gay liberation?

I always find it more interesting to write through glances and hints, as you put it. And that has always fascinated me: the world of insinuation and private code. And what happens when those constraints are removed. I suppose having a novel that spans a long stretch of time allows you to observe those changes as they accumulate. One thing I like about the structure of jumping forward and leaving gaps is that at the opening of each section the reader will need a moment to reorient, to figure out where they are, what era they’re in. I hope they come to realize that in each period there is a different moral atmosphere, a different legal situation possibly, that things have moved on.

In “The Line of Beauty,” Nick is an outsider, and the novel itself is a study of sex, class, and power in Thatcher’s Britain. In “The Sparsholt Affair,” Johnny and his father also navigate spaces of exclusion.

Yes, I’ve written a great deal about that ambiguous condition of being simultaneously inside and outside. And it obviously applies to a gay character who carries a second identity, one that can actually prove to be a means of advancement in certain cultures. David Sparsholt does something scandalous, we never learn exactly what, and his private self is brought into public view and into some kind of shame. Johnny, on the other hand, grew up with a crisis in his adolescence. He had to negotiate his own sexuality and how to present it to the world. And of course when he meets Ewert, he makes a kind of journey back in time himself. He encounters someone who was under the influence of his father in an earlier period. And he also enters a gay world that is obviously more secretive than the one that exists now.

One final question we enjoy asking British writers: are you aware of second thoughts in British society about Brexit?

I certainly have no second thoughts, but I hold firm to the ones I had from the start: that Brexit was a proven disaster. An extraordinary act in which a nation did itself only harm with nothing positive to show for it. I hope a government will eventually come along that acknowledges that fact. And that it was fundamentally a generational conflict. The vote for Brexit came primarily from older people. If we held a referendum today, I think many younger people would vote to remain. And all of this within an international climate where ethno-nationalism is increasingly threatening.

On Britain: “Gay privacy has become part of our history”

Your most recent novel, “Our Evenings,” marks something of a departure from your previous work, focusing on Dave Win, a mixed-race protagonist who discovers and suffers under the class structures of postwar England. Would you agree?

He is certainly a racially distinct narrator. And race has been on my mind for some time. I had written a number of times about interracial relationships, but always from the perspective of a white character. I thought, then, how interesting it would be to narrate the history of the period I lived through from a different racial vantage point. You would then have someone who could not conceal his difference of color in an English provincial world. At the same time, because he is the narrator of the novel, he needed to be very perceptive. So he is in a sense both inside and outside the world he finds himself in.

The title “Our Evenings” also suggests a looking back over an entire life. How did you balance the darker moments Dave faces at boarding school with the brighter spaces of the theater and performance where he finds his freedom?

What mattered to me was that Dave should not come across as a victim. And that he should not have a victim’s mentality. Even though there is a pattern of aggression toward him throughout the book, for various reasons, primarily racial, often verbal and sometimes physical. I felt that writing a book as a catalogue of microaggressions and grievances would be far too dull. I wanted someone with a strong enough sense of self and purpose, and with the drive of an artist to pursue his work as an actor and find his own spaces. So the first half of the book is largely about his education and finding himself in the world of the English establishment. The second half is more about finding himself outside the establishment, in this alternative theater company. And also in the various relationships he has, and in the rather strange new family formed by his mother and Elsie, on the margins of that very conventional provincial world. So yes, I think you’re right, it’s about escaping to a brighter place from somewhere that is potentially rather dark and threatening.

Your books have charted nearly a century of British queer history. Would you say something has been lost and something gained in the fabric of English society on these matters?

I think the gains have been enormous. I deeply appreciate the fact that we live in a kind of present that is not entirely free of discrimination, but is nonetheless a significantly changed condition, at least compared to the one I grew up in. I don’t feel that something has been lost. There have simply been enormous shifts in social perception, for instance around the idea of privacy. Privacy was so central, obviously, to gay identity during the periods when it was illegal. But now it is part of a historical transformation.